you can't build raising profit of whales alone.
Exactly.
@LJR69 There's a really good analogy to be made here to the creation of video game content, and specifically MMOs. See, as I was writing my post above, I was very specifically thinking about the contrast between
World of Warcraft (and thus Blizzard) and
Final Fantasy XIV (and thus Square Enix's oh-so-evocatively-named Creative Business Unit 3.) I don't know if you've played either game, so I'm going to assume you haven't; if you have, a lot of these details are going to be unnecessary, but other readers may not have, so it still serves some purpose.
WoW, when it got started, had an enormous base of customer goodwill and enthusiasm, which Blizzard leveraged
brilliantly to become THE hegemonic ruler of the MMO space. They were making money hand over fist, and for the base game and first two expansions, life was good. The game grew to even further heights, and fans were eating up the story. But the second expac,
Wrath of the Lich King, brought pretty much all of the story from the Warcraft strategy games to a close (there was still the threat of the Burning Legion, but it had at least partially been dealt with in the first expansion.) The writers were in uncharted territory and had to come up with new content to keep people interested.
This....did not end up going well.
Cataclysm, the third expansion, started the "bad expansion, good expansion" pattern--not that it was actually bad in and of itself, but it was something of a disappointment compared to WotLK, and for the first time the game
contracted rather than expanding as an expansion wore on. This caused the developers to prioritize the most heavily-invested players--and methods that could be used to objectively increase player investment. They tried to make WoW not just an MMO, but something you
had to be engaged with all the time in order to get anywhere, a "Red Queen's race" where you have to run as fast as you can just to keep up. I could go into specifics but they aren't really necessary for the analogy here. Point being: they tried to, as Mind of Tempest said, build profit off whales alone--and tried to make a game that encouraged
everyone to become a whale to one degree or another. Now you have a game that is roundly disliked and scrambling to fix its issues with its newest expansion after the
disaster that was
Shadowlands. This is, as I said above, an example of the "had the impetus before, but lost it due to people retiring/departing/etc." (Ignoring the other
disgusting things that occurred at Blizzard, of course...topic for another thread.)
By comparison, FFXIV represents my second example above: failure teaching a lesson. The people who designed FFXIV genuinely saw themselves as incapable of doing wrong; whatever game they made, the Final Fantasy playerbase would lap up because
of course they would, it's a Final Fantasy game. They failed to engage with one another inside the company, leading to disastrously bad choices like making flowerpots that had the same polygon count as
actual player characters and putting them EVERYWHERE inside major player hubs, making it almost impossible to play. They failed to include really basic, standard features like auto-attack and
jumping; they failed to include series staples despite clear references to them, such as not being able to ride the ostrich-like chocobos that are one of the series' mascots; they spent so much time and money making really excellent cutscenes that they failed to actually make a world worth adventuring through and, more importantly,
failed to consider whether the hardware could support those cutscenes. The introductory cutscene for the pirate-themed town Limsa Lominsa was so graphically intense, most PCs would
crash to desktop before completing it, locking some players out of playing the game entirely for a time.
The situation was incredibly, unbelievably bad. We're talking the President of Square Enix literally having to discuss the possibility that the company would go under. The game had performed so badly and angered so many of the fans that it literally could have killed the company. But they took a gamble--in the sense of not doing the get-rich-quick thing, but rather trying to re-build player trust and respect and all those other intangibles--and had Naoki Yoshida helm the reconstruction efforts. Not only did it pay off, but it paid off in a
big way. Accounting for FFXIV's intentional "play when you want, take breaks, it's okay, the game is still here when you want to come back" policy, FFXIV has experienced
continuous growth since the
A Realm Reborn relaunch, at a time when most MMOs are treading water at best. And it's very specifically because they've been beaten over the head with the importance of all those intangibles.
WotC is getting that beating now, and there's a good chance that they'll screw up the reconstruction. Because that reconstruction is hard! Because
earnestly apologizing,
truly getting why what they've done was wrong and
actually learning how to build future profits through investment into the intangibles and infrastructure, is all
difficult. It requires accepting perhaps lesser profits today, requires building structures and communication channels and support that eat into profits without having a direct, provable
link to future benefits. That's a tall order for any corporate type to grasp, much less successfully implement.
I really, truly hope that D&D is able to follow the example of FFXIV and genuinely learn the lessons that this debacle can teach. Unfortunately, I also know that that hope, as of this moment right now, is a thin and wavering one. WotC's moves over the next few weeks to months will tell us whether they can fix the HORRIBLE HORRIBLE HORRIBLE mess they've made, or whether (to steal from a rather melodramatic Kipling poem) "the Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return."
